This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I hesitate to post this one, but I'm doing so because it hits a near-perfect intersection of the hobby horses of something like 70% of the regular posters here. It turns out that Dario Amodei's wife is in the Epstein files, after his public conviction for sex offenses.
There's a lot to unpack here.
First, Epstein really was balls-deep in AI research. Marvin Minsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Joscha Bach was in direct communication with Epstein. Elon Musk was in direct communication with Epstein. Eliezar Yudkowsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Noam Chomsky was in direct communication with Epstein. Overall, Epstein's emails are a who's-who of AI research. Prior to this, Amodei had no known links to Epstein, and now he has one at one remove.
While the headline story is salacious and amusing (and probably a targeted hit job on Amodei), I wand to use it as a springboard for a few other topics.
A brief, non-rigorous analysis of the files suggests that AI researchers are over represented in the files after 2011, both in frequency and in message length. A charitable person could argue that it's because the average AI researcher didn't know that Epstein was a convicted sex offender after his public trial and conviction in 2011, but I don't buy that. I was a dumb 20-something in 2011 and I knew about it. It was in the newspapers. It was on the news on the TVs at the gym. These people are allegedly smarter and more plugged-in than I am. Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
Over the last few decades, utilitarianism really seems to have taken over popular discussions of ethics. Sometimes I wonder if that doesn't represent a failure of ethics in itself. As far as ethical systems go, Utilitarianism is easy to hack. Ignoring second order effects, choosing peculiar utility functions, using unrealistic time scales - it's all wrapped up together.
Moving on from that, I'd always known that bay area tech is pretty incestuous, but I don't think I'd realized how small, insular, and weird it was until recently. Clark having a personal relationship with Eric Schmidt and parlaying that into funding later was a surprise. Is that just how SF business gets done out there?
Overall, I'm not sure what to think about this. It feels like a targeted hit piece. I'm a cynical man, and my gut feeling is that it's a shot at pulling Amodei out of the big chair at Anthropic. I have no proof of that, but the timing relative to their alleged IPO is interesting, and coincidences are hard to believe when the players are all so tightly coupled as they are in the AI industry. If it is true, though, it makes me wonder who could be involved.
Are we playing six degrees from Jeff Epstein? Really? Like if you manage to become a party pad for some subset of wealthy influential people you're now connected, at least at some unusually-low degree of removal, to all of them, because wealthy influential people like to associate with each other.
Coincidence? Very plausible.
Especially the fundraising/VC space where once somebody is identified as rich and open as a possible source of investment, everybody will beat a path to their door and be as convivial as possible to try and extract some of the sweet techbux. Sure Epstein had a rich seam of interest in whoremonging but he was also a billionaire who was incredibly connected
The reallll interesting questions come from how he became a billionaire and how he got those initial connections.
Its possible that he managed to social-proof his way into elite circles and was exceptionally good at convincing rich people he had a magic touch.
It is very, VERY rare for someone to become a 'legitimate' billionaire without starting a company that takes off to success/getting early equity in a startup, or being a famed celebrity who leverages their image heavily.
He did neither of those.
Which suggests (to me) some sort of organized criminal enterprise as the last likely option. And virtually no such enterprise can operate at such levels without either intimidating, buying/bribing, or being tacitly approved by some government entity.
So I dunno, what hypotheses do we have for how he bootstrapped the connections and billions whilst leaving very, very little trail of how he did it.
Epstein was a millionaire, not a billionaire.
Secondly, There is a very large, very ordinary gray zone of questionable to even illegal wealth portfolio that does not require a "global child sex trafficking" conspiracy to explain.
His connections begin to make sense when you treat "the elites" in his orbit as ordinary human beings capable of stupidity, vanity, and bad judgment than as a cold, coordinated hivemind operating from the top floor of Evil Inc.
Both "victims" and "connections" tell us he was an ambitious smooth talker who was super duper good at attaching himself to powerful people and making them feel like they were getting something valuable. His knowledge about the architecture of modern finance was impressive, we're told. Combine his knack for sociability with above average intelligence and it's easy to see why men like Chomsky would be charmed by him.
Charisma is the ability to get someone to do what they would not otherwise do. That is a higher-base-rate explanation for things like the Wexner relationship than a sophisticated, government tolerated and Mossad-led blackmail enterprise that somehow left almost no operational footprint. At least nothing to actually.... convict any of his friends.
And this is an age where such large scale, systematic trafficking and blackmail of the kind imagined would generate multipple records, witnesses, communications, financial trails, opportunistic leaks and competing incentives among so-called participants. To me, that's a much harder sell than a disordered, opportunistic socialite who climbed socially, engaged in some illegal sexual activity with underage girls (personally), and left behind a mess that looks more chaotic than engineered.
The best published estimates of Epstein's peak net worth are around $350 million.
Epstein's main source of wealth is his relationship with Les Wexner, who founded L Brands, a retail empire which ended up owning (among other brands) Victoria's Secret, Abercromie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works. Googling suggests Wexner had a peak net worth of $9.6 billion, so Epstein got about 4% of it. Epstein was, over a 20-year period, managing basically all Wexner's assets apart from his L Brands stock, as well as large parts of his personal life.
It is just about plausible that Epstein was exploiting Wexner's trust to charge ridiculously high fees (charging 2-and-20 to buy leveraged S&P futures is a good living if you can get it) to manage Wexner's non-L Brands assets and made the $350 million in a legal-but-scuzzy way. It is also possible, and in my view more likely given Epstein's history of criminality, that he was embezzling. But you don't need a non-Wexner sources of dirty money to explain Epstein's wealth.
Incidentally, Wexner met Epstein before Maxwell did (1987 vs "early 1990's") and was deeply involved in pro-Israel activism, so if Epstein was a Mossad asset it makes a lot more sense that Wexner rather than Maxwell made the initial contacts. Top conspiracy theory is that of course Wexner did not in fact display uncharacteristic naivety in his relationship with his majordomo, and was in fact deliberately overpaying Epstein as a way of paying him under the table for his work for Israel. (I'm not sure why I don't believe this one - it actually makes a lot of sense).
For one, this theory is notably light on specifics. What was the work performed? What information was obtained, and what outcomes were achieved? And why was this particular channel chosen over more conventional ones? Absent those details, it functions more as a way of making the residual awkwardness of the relationship feel intentional rather than foolish.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link